October’s Night Sky Notes: Spooky Stargazing

Something wicked this way comes—and it's winking at us from the constellation Perseus. This October, NASA's night sky guide invites stargazers to meet Algol, the "Demon Star" or "The Ghoul," the mythological blinking eye of Medusa. For ancient Greeks, this malevolent twinkle was the gaze of a monster; for modern astronomers, it's an eclipsing binary system where one star periodically swallows another's light. The universe doesn't need supernatural explanations to be terrifyingly beautiful—it just needs